Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Obamacare Will Kill Far More Than the VA Scandal

By Alan
Caruba

The news that
some forty veterans died whlle waiting to receive care from a Phoenix Veterans
Affairs hospital—care that was denied because of bureaucratic chicanery—will seem
small in comparison to the numbers of Americans who will die from the
implications of Obamacare.

At this point, some nineteen VA hospitals
are under suspicion of engaging in similar practices, but as large as the VA
bureaucracy is, it will be small in comparison to what Obamacare requires. The
original legislation that combined the Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act represented nearly
2,700 pages.

The
regulations that are being created to implement it will run to several volumes.
By late 2013, the Obama administration had published 11,588,500 words of final
Obamacare regulations. If looks can kill, that many words will surely kill.
Too many people will be unble to get the care they need because there will be a
regulation to prevent it.

What is
making headlines now has long been known in other nations with national
healthcare systems. It is about rationing, not dispensing care; if for no other
reason that is why healthcare should remain in the private sector.

Unless a
future Congress repeals Obamacare, the death toll will mount. There have been
some forty or more pieces of legislation to repeal it passed in the Republican-controlled House of
Representatives. No Republican voted for Obamacare when it was introduced.

What we
know is that, while serving on the oversight committee, then-Senator Obama was
aware of the VA problems before he ran for President. In 2009, as President, he promised veterans to fix the problems. How concerned is he in 2014? There has been a
noticeable lack of public comment from a President famed for having something
to say about everything that makes headlines.

Add the VA
scandal to the long list of Obama administration scandals from the IRS to
Benghazi, but it is Obamacare that has already been a monumental failure and,
as we begin to receive news of those who will die as because a local hospital
closed or because they lost the care of a personal physician familiar with
their problem, it will emerge as the greatest scandal of his presidency.

On March
23, 2010 Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. By October, the Obama
administration abandoned the long-term-care insurance program that was in the
law. It was later formally repealed by Congress, but the changes that President
has initiated since then ignore the fact that only Congress, as the
legislative branch, has the power to make such changes.

December
2012 was the deadline for states to decide on running their own insurance
exchanges; 36 states left all or part of the job to the federal government. In
the lead up to the October 2013 launch of HealthCare.gov more delays were
announced by the White House and the website turned out to be a complete
disaster. That same month insurers notified thousands of policy holders that
their health plans were not compliant with Obamacare and would be cancelled.

In effect,
Obamacare caused hundreds of thousands of people with healthcare plans they
liked to lose them, thus artificially increasing the number of “uninsured”. In
April the White House announced that seven million had signed up for Obamacare.
Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, gave notice she
was resigning. The figure cited by the White House is likely dubious.

In May, an
article in The Fiscal Times reported that “A handful of state-run exchange
websites—which cost nearly a half a billion dollars to build—still don’t work,
nearly seven months after they first went live.” The Fiscal Times estimated
that Obamacare websites had cost $5 billion and so many were not functional
that the original plan to transition signups to them from HealthCare.gov was
likely to be abandoned.

To mark the anniversary of Obamacare’s
enactment, in March 2014 the American Action Forum released a report that the
law’s regulatory burdens are twice as great as its alleged benefits. “From a
regulatory perspective, the law has imposed more than $27.2 billion in total
private sector costs, $8 billion in unfunded state burdens, and more than 159
million paperwork hours on local governments and affected entities.”

It’s
rarely mentioned or reported, but the implementation of Obamacare will also
require an increase in the number of people either full-time or under contract
with the federal government. The highest estimate for new Internal Revenue Service
hires is around 16,000 as the IRS has been put in charge of enforcing
Obamacare. It already employs about 100,000 people nationwide which means there
is one IRS employee for every 3,000 Americans.

“Obamacare,”
wrote Ferrera, “has been a major drag on the economy, preventing full recovery
from the recession. Employers trying to avoid the costs of the employer mandate
have reduced many full time jobs to part time jobs. Or that have frozen hiring,
and the associated costs due to Obamacare. This is contributing to income
stagnation and decline for the middle class, the working class, and the poor.”

L. Brent
Bozell of the Media Research Center asked “How do we know Obamacare is failing?
They’re burying the story. They aren’t in denial. They know the truth. They’re
just choosing to ignore it.”

A Center
analysis of the three network evening news broadcasts from January through
March found only twelve full stories about Obamacare. “None of the networks
dared to report the ongoing opposition of the American people to Obamacare”
over that period of time, even when they were the ones doing the polling!

The real
story of Obamacare, however, isn’t about who signed up or not. The real story
of Obamacare that is not being reported is about those who have died and will
die as the result of this horrendous experiment in socialized medicine.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.